For my documentary project, I decided to focus on brutal regimes, mostly in and around Asia. I watched The Missing Picture and The Act Of Killing. Both of them play with the idea of artifice, The Act of Killing playing off of the storied war crimes of Indonesia during its systematic killing of alleged Communists. The Missing Picture instead focuses on the Khmer Rogue regime of Cambodia, telling the story through clay figurines and a mysterious voice-over. I also watched Exit Through The Gift Shop which is unrelated in its relation to genocide (although it does focus on the genocide of artistic integrity.) I decided on it because of its twisty, untrustworthy narrative that parallels the two previous films.

Both films, as well as the overwhelming human tragedy that led to their events, are about artifice: deception or fakery, a perception that is either flimsy or one-sided. For example, a bunch of former Indonesian war-criminal cronies get together to make a marvelously depraved and bizarre film glorifying their days as mass murderers. This is the framing device for the film. The fictional depiction of events in the jingoistic “film-within-a-film” is just as bizarre as eighty-year-old men, staunching deep-seated regret, talking about the time they torched and pillaged a Pinko village. The line between fiction and reality blurs to the point that reality and fiction neatly elide. Someone said “Truth is stranger than fiction.” This very much applies to the film. Both versions of the story, the horrendously white-washed or the shockingly true, are horribly topsy-turvy and moth-holed with half-truths, governmental red-tape, and long-inhumed secrets kept by an insane government that killed everybody they could get a false confession out of. In a sense, the truth is fiction and the fiction is truth since so much of it is revised, redacted, or otherwise. In a country recently recovered from totalitarian rule, history is a blank tablet, scrubbed clean, and re-etched to fit a convenient narrative. People, especially, tend to be erased from existence. This is often called “damnatio memoriae”, or “damnation of memory.” This has been done since ancient times, names like “Commodus”, “Sejanus” , and many others, scrubbed and painted off from the alabaster and marble walls of ancient temples.

Alexius Meinong, Austrian philosopher, came up with ideas involving the fictional world, which lead to the idea of “Meinong’s Jungle.” Meinong’s Jungle is a plot of land, if you will, deeply wooded, a resting place for all the almost-beens, and the not-quite-haves. The fictional. For example, Meinong said that a fictional creature, for example, a minotaur, has real world connection, a “stake” in the real world. It has the head of a bull, which exists, and a human body, which also exists. Since it has a sliver of reality, why can’t it be slightly real? Why can’t it exist on simply a higher plane? The epistemological jungle of Meinong, which is in itself, everything within mankind’s ken. All of his knowledge and all of his creations. Fiction builds on fiction, whether it’s ekphrasis or simply addition to a narrative. Soon enough, the Jungle is bustling. In this same way, Cambodia and Indonesia are steeped in the Jungle, existing on separate planes of unreality, of invented narrative, and the truth which can’t be verified anyway, and is just as amorphous as the probable fictions, just as nameless and formless as the dead whose identities cannot be verified. They are in a sense, fictional. They knew other people, who are also dead, and live on only in stories. How does that make them real? Just like the unidentified leg of the 169th victim of the Oklahoma City fertilizer bomb attack. Who was that? Nobody will ever know. Who are all the people sunk into peat bogs and rice paddies by The Glorious Peoples Republic of Kampuchea? Nobody. They live in stories. They live in memories. They are ephemeral, nonexistent, fictional almost. Yet they still hold a stake in the world. They still traipse through the Jungle, peeking out and rustling the leaves.

The film The Missing Picture, especially plays on this. The titular Missing Picture is a sort of bushwhacking through Meinong’s Jungle, especially highlighted by it’s intentionally artificial style. It pieces together it’s autobiographical story through a combination of footage shot from present day, archival footage from the Khmer Rogue regime, and small clay figurines combined with various projections. The style is crude, sometimes very effective, other times somewhat lazy-feeling and uninteresting. Unfortunately, despite some good scenes, you can do your house chores while you watch this film because the visuals usually don’t add a thing. It feels like an audio-book with decent visuals attached.  For the most part, it is successful thematically. Not only does it look charming most of the times and is brought to life by sound design, but it also especially highlights the role of artifice in the story, as well as in dictatorships in general. This is highlighted in the style because the style is so obviously fake. Middle-school dioramas are paired with a deeply affecting story of human tragedy. Yet, despite the un-dynamic style, the film works on the basis of revisionism. In place of mildewed, ruined film that we see our main-character thumb through, it fills in the “Missing Picture.” “The Missing Picture” being the truth, being the one true happening that is deeply personal, macular, as well as over-arching, a history of dizzying human tragedy. The story is true to one person none of us as viewers will ever meet. Memory is bleary and untrustworthy so even this personal revision could be based on nothing, yet it is. Aside from it’s clearly fake and literally “wooden” style, The Missing Picture examines the personal narrative as compared to the large-scale, Khmer Rogue-produced narrative, the twisting of facts, the stories of harsh ideologues that convicted their own kin on the basis of “anti-revolutionary sentiment.” It peels all that back, allowing us a look into the underbrush of the Jungle, to better understand what led up to a tragic and utterly brutal time in human history. It is also to understand the role of artifice and of revisionism in dictatorships. Such as the stories of Kim Jong Il inventing the hamburger and being the best golfer in the world that are wall-to-wall in North Korea, a perfect example of a country under the crush of a Personality Cult and a iron-fisted regime. In many of the same ways, the Khmer Rogue regime lied. It threw Western medicine out of the window and instead favored bunk ancient medicinal practices that just made more people die. Also, the Khmer Rogue’s fierce denial of the moon landing, as detailed in the film, is another example of historical revisionism to back up a narrative. Mr. Brainwash, the enigmatic, possibly fictional character in Exit Through The Gift Shop, shifts the narrative to steal Banksy's style and make squillions off his legacy. This is the same as, though far more petty, as what the Khmer Rogue did to its citizens.

Overall, these two films show two unconscionable tragedies and their aftermaths as well as the personal and national scars they left. Both of them explain, through both theme and medium, that artifice is integral to a totalitarian regime. Nobody can be under the yoke of a authoritarian regime if the “picture” is “missing.” Some aspect of the “picture” has to be removed and neatly replace. And what separates that from reality? It’s absolute truth to a few people. How does that invalidate it? Did Kim Jong Il invent the hamburger? Otto Kuasw did, of course, in 1891. But how do you know that? Because you looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, Google, what have you. How do you know that’s true? Ex-Google employee Will Scott recently visited North Korea, getting a copy of “Red Star 3”, a operating system wholesale ripped off from Mac OS, except plastered with bucolic, patriotic wallpaper of cherry blossoms floating down rivers, and completely and totally censored and secure. Imagine if you are a North Korean citizen. Your child unit is learning accordion under pain of death. The other child unit is practicing a synchronized dance for the Supreme Leader’s jubilee under pain of forced labour for forty ensuing generations. You’re on Red Star 3, on your computer in the Pyongyang Institute for the Intellectual Transcendency of The Superior North Korean Comradeship. You’re curious as to who invented the hamburger and you look it up on knock-off Google. It says Kim Jong Il, our venerable, honored leader invented the hamburger without a doubt, and landed on the moon, and discovered alternating current while creating the polio vaccine while building the pyramids of Khufu. You are satisfied. This is an answer you’ve lived your life to accept. Who says it isn’t true?